David Brooks is feeling nostalgic. And any time someone like Brooks, who has made a career bloviating from the New York Times op-ed pages or the pages of one of his own books, feels nostalgic, you can bet that they’re about to go on a tirade about how the America of today is just missing something.
This time, Brooks is feeling nostalgic about literature, and he’s spreading his opinions no one asked for about how it has declined in an op-ed titled “When Novels Mattered.” Ann Patchett, author and owner of Parnassus Books, already offered her own delicious clap-back to this op-ed in an edition of her weekly “new to you” video, recommending a bevy of books and authors that prove literature is just fine, thank you very much. But I wanted to build off of that, so here we are.
I did have a debate with myself about whether or not to do this, though. The thing about posts like this is they’re so contrary and provocative that it feels like the author wants your attention more than they want to be right. So why even bother? Why give him the attention he wants so cravenly–and why risk getting a clickbait post even more clicks? Maybe it’s because I’m a New Yorker by birth, and when someone does something stupid, I feel a need to say, “That was stupid.”
The trouble is, responding to a stupid generalization means stating an obvious truth: literature is fine. But I want to go a little further than that. People like David Brooks want to police what people are reading. Why can’t they just leave people alone? After all, if people weren’t reading at all, he’d be complaining about that instead (and I would be in the awkward position of agreeing with David Brooks).
Now, to be clear, honest, and upfront: I have a history of being uninterested in David Brooks’ writing. I have not read any of his books, and I don’t think I had ever actually finished one of his op-eds before this one. My experience of David Brooks is that he thinks of himself as a moderate, but in practice, he just keeps complaining about how liberals are destroying the country. That is literally where this op-ed about the “decline of literature” is headed. I also think he’s the type of person who often makes big sweeping statements without a solid foundation of information or thinking to support those ideas.
A podcast I love, If Books Could Kill, did an episode about David Brooks and his book Bobos in Paradise. They do a much better job of providing an overview of Brooks, his career, and why his writing isn’t great, so I recommend checking that out. If you do podcasts through Apple, you can find the episode here (otherwise, just look it up on your podcast platform of choice).
The other thing I find very annoying about this conversation is that people are always, generation after generation, talking about how things are getting worse. Maybe they say it generally, that society is crumbling. When I was a kid, Boomers and the media were constantly complaining about Gen X, then they pivoted to Millennials, and now they’re doing it to Zoomers. Literally every generation gets complained about. It’s the same in literature. This complaint that things are getting worse is a tale as old as time. Noted literary critic Harold Bloom believed that Western literature peaked in the days of Shakespeare, and everything that followed became progressively worse.
Let’s back up for a moment and talk about what he says in his op-ed. The first thing to know is that Brooks appears to have been inspired by a Substack article by Owen Yingling entitled “The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction.” And if Brooks’ piece is more of the same lazy “blame-the-liberals” claptrap he has been defaulting to since his first book, Bobos in Paradise, the Yingling post is even more reactionary. All you really need to know about it is that Yingling spends most of the article complaining that white men aren’t getting published in The New Yorker as much as he thinks they should anymore, he repeats claims that publishers are pushing white male authors out of the industry (who is he? Joyce Carol Oates?), and he includes this eye-roll inducing quote: “No one can deny that publishing has ‘gone woke,’ but this alone is insufficient to explain literary fiction’s nosedive.” Really? No one can deny that?
I don’t want to get bogged down in the Yingling article because it’s, frankly, kinda insane, but I think there’s something in Yingling’s piece that is less explicit in Brooks’ op-ed, but which appears to be the crux of what they see as the problem with literature today: it’s not white and male enough. They see diversity in publishing as a problem. Yingling flat-out assumes that if publishing is becoming increasingly diverse, it must be because publishers and editors are seeking ‘moral status’ as something more valuable than publishing good books. Anyone who is part of a minority group should bristle at this: it’s another way of saying “you didn’t earn your place, you’re a diversity hire.” It assumes that diverse stories from diverse authors just don’t have the level of quality that you would get from white male authors writing about white male characters.
This is what David Brooks draws inspiration from. Here’s how he opens his op-ed:
I’m old enough to remember when novelists were big-time. When I was in college in the 1980s, new novels from Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Alice Walker and others were cultural events. There were reviews and counterreviews and arguments about the reviews.
I’m sorry, are there no reviews anymore? I feel like Brooks’ colleagues at the Book Review must feel a little slighted.
What he means to complain about is that authors of literary fiction aren’t lighting up the bestseller lists anymore:
It’s not just my nostalgia that’s inventing this. In the mid- to late 20th century, literary fiction attracted huge audiences. If you look at the Publishers Weekly list of best-selling novels of 1962, you find works by Katherine Anne Porter, Herman Wouk and J.D. Salinger. The next year you find books by Mary McCarthy and John O’Hara.
… Today it’s largely Colleen Hoover and fantasy novels and genre fiction.
So we’re complaining about genre fiction–even if Brooks almost immediately claims that he has no problem with “genre and popular books.” I don’t know, dude. It sounds like you do. It really does.
The real problem is that data about how a particular book sold is surprisingly hard to come by. I tried to find specific sales data for Percival Everett’s James in addition to other recent literary hits and it’s not available. Genre books indeed crowd these literary fiction titles out of the top ten in terms of sales each year, but I couldn’t find actual sales data to see if the decline is real for literary fiction. The fact is, these genre books topping the charts today are selling a significantly larger number of books than were sold back in the 1960s and 1970s.
Brooks specifically cites E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint as examples of literary fiction that topped the bestseller list for the years in which they were published. From what I can find, Ragtime sold 250,000 copies in its first year (1975) while Portnoy’s Complaint sold 400,000 copies in 1969. The bestselling book in 2024 was Kristin Hannah’s The Women, which sold 1.5 million copies. The book in 10th place for 2024 was Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us, which sold 757,000 copies. Yes, the book in tenth place sold almost double the number of copies of Portnoy’s Complaint.
As I indicated, it’s surprisingly difficult to find specific sales data for many recent books that didn’t make the top ten in terms of sales. However, I did find that Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? sold approximately 500,000 copies. I’m not sure if that’s for the first year alone (I don’t think it is), but even if it is for the first two years of sales, that number is on par with at least Ragtime. And Sally Rooney is one of the current writers that David Brooks appears to approve of.
Brooks is an established op-ed writer for The New York Times. He could get this data to compare actual numbers if he wanted to, but at the end of the day he’s more interested in complaining about literary fiction getting crowded out by genre fiction on bestseller lists. The data doesn’t matter to him.
Look, I shouldn’t have to say this, but genre fiction isn’t inherently bad. And look, the fact that 1.5 million people bought a copy of Kristin Hannah’s The Women is great. I’ve heard good things about that book. I might even read it someday. And by the way, it’s not genre fiction. Historical fiction, but the last two winners of the Pulitzer Prize have been historical fiction. But Kristin Hannah is frequently derided by literary snobs as “women’s fiction.”
I think about something Ann Patchett said during an interview, when someone asked her how she feels as a literary fiction writer about the state of literature. She said she’s grateful for authors like Colleen Hoover and Rebecca Yarros because they keep the lights on at her bookstore, Parnassus. Like it or not, that’s what people are buying in large numbers–and why would anyone disapprove of that? At the end of the day, people are buying books! And they’re reading! That’s a good thing!
Brooks goes on to scare his readers with this statistic: “The National Endowment for the Arts has been surveying people for decades, and the number who even claim to read literature has been declining steadily since 1982.” Interestingly, this appears to be more information he gleaned from Yingling’s article, which notes that the National Endowment for the Arts tracks that “the number of Americans who ‘read literature’ has fallen from 56.9% in 1982 to 46.7% in 2002 to 38% in 2022.” But Brooks ignores the last part of Yingling’s paragraph, which notes that “the actual size of the fiction reading population has not shrunk a meaningful amount (population growth), and… even if the facts were right, it couldn’t be correct: in 1955, the number of Americans who even read one book a year (39%) was lower than it is today (53%). And the 1950s and 1960s were supposedly the golden-age of American fiction.” Did that part not suit your narrative, Mr. Brooks?
Next, Brooks bemoans the days when “novelists and artists served as consciences of the nation, as sages and prophets, who could stand apart and tell us who we are.” He goes on to note that “novelists were accorded lavish attention as late as the 1980s, and some became astoundingly famous: Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote.” Not only are all three of those examples white men, they’re all alcoholics with notably toxic relationships–both of which often bled into their public personas. Movies and TV shows have been made about how Truman Capote’s callousness and drinking led to alienation from the very people he originally sought approval from. And when I think of Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer appearing on TV as “intellectuals,” all I can think of is the time the two men made spectacles of themselves on The Dick Cavett Show in a notorious episode in which they took over the conversation to air their own petty grievances, and in which casual jokes are made about Mailer’s history of violence and fears that he may deploy that on camera. He didn’t that night, but he did hit Gore Vidal at a party six years later.
By the way, Mailer was so combative against all three panelists that after he interrupted host Dick Cavett to tell him to go back to his list of questions, Dick Cavett responded, “Why don’t you fold [the list] five ways and put it where the moon don’t shine?”
By the way, Mailer stabbed his wife in 1960. And after, he told the remaining party guests “Let the bitch die.”
By the way, despite all this, Norman Mailer was on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1974 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1980 for Executioner’s Song. When I build up the stamina to read that brick of a book for my Pulitzer Prize Project, the deep dive will be insane.
By the way, I’m focusing on Mailer so much that Gore Vidal is getting off light here, even though he is also legendary for being a jerk.
This is what David Brooks misses?
To be fair, he does name-drop Toni Morrison and James Baldwin in other parts of the op-ed. If only they were the examples he used “as consciences of the nation, as sages and prophets, who could stand apart and tell us who we are.” But of course, they weren’t afforded the same level of literary celebrity that Vidal, Mailer, and Capote were (I wonder what could possibly be different about Morrison and Baldwin). And of course, Brooks would probably dismiss their ability to “tell us who we are” as liberal wokeness. Imagine the cognitive dissonance required for Brooks to mention The Bluest Eye as an example of artists and writers “attempting big, audacious things” in the 1970s while dismissing The Handmaid’s Tale and Demon Copperhead as “reliably left-wing literary novels.”
Audacity is at the heart of the “decline” of literary fiction as Brooks sees it, specifically noting, “I would say there has been a general loss in confidence and audacity across Western culture over the past 50 years.” I’m not convinced that Brooks and I are witnessing the same Western Culture at the moment, because I would say that Americans are not lacking in confidence or audacity. If nothing else, many white Americans are feeling quite emboldened to be terrible in the present day.
Where does Brooks think this loss of audacity comes from? Here’s what he has to say:
Something happened to literature when the center of gravity moved from Greenwich Village to M.F.A. programs on university campuses. When I got out of college, I dreamed of being a novelist or playwright. I volunteered to be an extremely junior editor at a literary journal called Chicago Review. But after a few meetings, I thought, “Do I really want to spend the rest of my life gossiping about six obscure novelists at the Iowa writing program?” It seemed like a small and judgmental world.
Notably, David Brooks has only published works of nonfiction. No novels, no plays. Methinks these are the words of a spurned lover. Pretty convenient that he claims to have given up his dreams of being someone like Vidal, Mailer, or Capote because the M.F.A. programs took the soul out of the industry.
By the way, it doesn’t escape my attention that Brooks is bemoaning an America where authors were essentially filling a role he himself is working to occupy in the present with his op-eds and books. The role these authors were filling then has been taken over by pundits, mostly resigned to news networks who need to fill a 24-hour news cycle. Instead of complaining about M.F.A. programs, Brooks could take aim at how pundits dominate media today, but then he might have to reckon with himself.
Listen, is it true that M.F.A. programs have become something of a requirement for aspiring writers? Yes. But that’s not unique to the literary world. My father worked in public relations for pharmaceutical companies and was among the top in his field when I was a kid. Today, he wouldn’t be able to get a job at any of those companies at all. Why? Because all he had was an undergrad degree. The goalposts have moved for anyone trying to make it in America today. It’s a systemic problem, but Brooks doesn’t want to complain about the system. He’d rather take aim at grad students and their teachers, because anyone who complains about liberals as much as Brooks does thinks colleges are the real problem.
But here’s where things really go off the rails:
Furthermore, the literary world is a progressive world, and progressivism — forgive me, left-wing readers — has a conformity problem. Even more than on the right, there are incredible social pressures in left-wing circles to not say anything objectionable. (On the right, by contrast, it seems that you get rewarded the more objectionable things you can say.)
Just go away, David Brooks. Begone.
He cites a study published in The British Journal of Social Psychology in 2023:
They found that left-leaning people tended to have more extreme and more orthodox and tightly clustered views on these issues. If you know what a left-leaning person thinks about immigration, you can predict what he thinks about abortion. Right-leaning people tend to have more diverse and discordant views. A right-leaning person’s view on immigration is less predictive of his views on gun control. There’s more conformity on the left.
I’m not a journalist on par with Michael Hobbes from If Books Could Kill, so I don’t feel comfortable digging into the study to see what’s what. Maybe there are holes in it, maybe there aren’t. All I can say is that the study actually does find that it’s possible to predict how right-leaning people will react to the other issues, it’s just a little less consistent compared to left-leaning participants.
But I can speak to my own experience as a left-leaning person. Yes, I do feel strongly that abortion shouldn’t be illegal–and I feel all the more passionate about it because that right has been under attack from conservatives for decades–and they won. It’s appalling.
Yes, I also feel strongly about common-sense gun control–and I feel all the more passionate about it because there’s been a gun problem in America for at least thirty years (arguably longer), and it has not been fixed because conservatives have been actively standing in the way and allowing kids in schools to die (not to mention people in movie theaters, or at concerts, etc.).
Yes, I feel strongly about immigration–and I feel all the more passionate about it because my mother is a first-generation American, so I know the story of people who came to this country wanting more, or to escape, and how hard they worked to settle here. My mother’s family is Italian, and for many years, Italian immigrants were villified and demeaned, and quotas were put in place to keep many of them out (my grandfather only got here because of an arranged marriage to my grandmother, who got here before the quotas took effect). So when conservatives today vilify, demean, and try to keep out a different group of potential immigrants, I take issue with that.
Yes, I feel strongly that gay people like me should be allowed to get married, adopt or foster kids, and not be discriminated against in the workplace or for housing, etc.–and I feel all the more passionate about it because it’s literally my quality of life that’s at stake here. And conservatives would deny me those basic human rights.
So if I participated in that study, I would be a left-leaning person whose beliefs are strongly held and predictable. It’s not because I’m a conformist, Mr. Brooks, and it’s not because I’m afraid of what other left-leaning people might think of me if I step outside the lines. It’s because I’m part of a frequently vilified minority group, so I take issue when other minority groups are similarly demonized. It’s because I don’t want to see any more headlines about women dying because they were denied access to necessary healthcare, or hear any more heartbreaking stories about women who don’t have the means to get to a place where they can access the reproductive care that is their right. It’s because I don’t want any more headlines about shootings.
I suppose Brooks can’t imagine that these beliefs could be genuine. That says a lot about him if you ask me. And it makes it even more insulting when he says, “Most important, if you don’t have raw social courage, you’re not going to get out of your little bubble and do the reporting necessary to understand what’s going on in the lives of people unlike yourself — in that vast boiling cauldron that is America.”
I’m a left-leaning gay man living in a deeply red state. Trust me, I’m out of my bubble. But the whole concept of bubbles is ridiculous anyway, because when I lived in New York, I was exposed to so many different people, different ideas, and different ways of life. If anything, Montana is the bubble where you live in an echo chamber of similar ideas.
Significantly, Brooks is blaming liberals for the decline of literature–and his proof is a diaphonous argument that liberalism is beholden to conformity. You know what he doesn’t talk about? Book banning! Censorship! But he can’t talk about those issues, because those are led by conservatives. So he completely ignores a real problem facing readers, bookstores, libraries, and publishers to pursue a threadbare thesis about liberals.
It’s ludicrous.
Bringing his op-ed to a close, Brooks notes that when he looks at all the shockwaves sent out by current events, “I would love to read big novels capturing these psychological and spiritual storms. And yet sometimes when I peek into the literary world, it feels like a subculture off to the side.” He’s complaining that his culture, which used to be the mainstream, exists today a bit off to the side. First of all, assuming that your interests should be everyone’s interests is a gross form of hubris. Second, the culture still exists. I am part of a whole community of people who discuss literary fiction on YouTube and Instagram.
David Brooks has an incredible platform. If he really wanted to support literary fiction, he wouldn’t complain that a failure of social pressure and nerve is holding the form back. He would join the conversation and prop up books and authors he likes. I’m here because I want to be part of a community with other readers, and I want to support the authors and publishers who produce books that I believe other readers will love, or stories that I’d like to see more of. That’s why I frequently encourage people to try to purchase a copy of a book they like if they have the means. It supports the author and it sends a message to bookstores and to publishers that there are people who want to see books like that in the world.
But once again, David Brooks isn’t interested in doing the work so much as he wants to complain about liberals.
Supposedly Fun 